Gawker edits Knopf editor Carole Baron, and boy does she need it.
There is much chatter about David Shields's liberal use of quotations in Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (the Times calls him a "free appropriation writer"), but his own thoughts still appear in the book. For one, he calls James Frey a "terrible writer." Here's an excerpt of Shields cross-fading quips on hip-hop; can you spot his pithy musings among those by Picasso, Godard, Goethe, Emerson, and Borges?
Despite clunky novels like Yellow Dog, his views on Islam, and recent spats in the press with former friends, Martin Amis is still a "great novelist," according to The Independent. But in our opinion, he hasn't hit his stride since his memoir in which he wrote about his dad, his bad-boy persona, and his fake teeth.
The New York Review of Books explains how Philip Roth could call the anti-Semitic Louis-Ferdinand Céline "my Proust;" Roth had to "suspend [his] Jewish conscience."
Amazon buys Audible.
Oh, the indignity of being an old-school journalist afloat in the digital sea. The Atlantic writer James Fallows recently complained on the site that the redesign "drains [the blogs] of variety and individuality, not to mention making them much less convenient to read." Indeed, his misgivings were chopped by the new, guillotine-like landing page, so he had to move his critique to the lede of another post.
